“Not here. We’re too deep in the valley. When we’re turkey hunting, if we go over the top of the bluffs, we can’t pick up a call from the cabin. And you can’t call out from the cabin on your cell phone. You have to be up on top.”
“Okay.” She glanced at her watch. “You better change.”
He got into his cool-weather camo, got his sleeping bag, put three power snacks and two bottles of springwater in his hip pockets. He took a full box of shells, loading four into the rifle, the rest into the elastic loops of the cartridge holders on the camo jacket; he’d never used the loops before, and fumbled the shells getting them in.
Nervous. And getting a little high on the coming combat.
Madison had taken the shotgun out of the case and was looking it over. “It’s just about like mine,” she said.
As Jake checked a flashlight, he watched her handling it. She knew what she was doing. “Snap it a few times, then load it up.”
She dry-fired it, pointing it across the room at a framed photo of the hunting group, using a trapshooter’s stance. Satisfied, she shoved some shells into the magazine.
“If one of them comes through the door, keep pulling the trigger until he goes down.” She nodded, and Jake said, “I’m going to run outside. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He slung the rifle over his shoulder and picked up the game-trail spotters and the flashlight. If they were out there . . . but they wouldn’t have been able to move that fast. If they’d moved deliberately, but hadn’t done anything weird, like rent a helicopter, they’d arrive in perhaps four hours. He had time.
Outside, the night was cool, damp. The leaves would be quiet; he would have preferred a crisper, drier night. He carried the game cameras around to the west side of the house, the side he wouldn’t be able to see, and began tying them into trees between the cabin and the pond. If they did come in from the west, they’d trip the infrared flashes, and he’d see the flashes . . .
Unless, of course, a deer came in. Then he’d get a false alarm. But the grasses on the open slopes around the cabin didn’t pull many deer in. He’d have to hope for the best.
Back in the cabin, they synced the radios. Jake switched his to “vibrate” and said, “When you get up in the morning, turn the TV on, first thing. Change channels every few minutes, but news channels. Leave the one window open just an inch, so they can hear it. Keep the blinds down, except the one over the kitchen sink. Leave that half up. When I give you four chirps, that means . . .”
“Walk past the window,” she said.
Jake nodded. “Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to give them time to fire a shot, but you want them to see your body. For Christ’s sake, don’t look outside—they might see your face and take off. If they just see the flannel shirt, your arm, all they’ll pick up is the movement.”
She touched her lip with her tongue. She was nervous, too. “Okay.”
“If they get me, then they’ll have to come after you,” Jake said. “That’ll only happen if there are several of them. If there are several, you know what to do.”
“I call for you, at the open window, so they can hear my voice.”
“That should scare them off,” Jake said. “If not, I’ll take them on. You call nine-one-one, you yell at me that the cops are coming, so they’ll know. Then you tip the tables as barricades, make them come through the doors to get you. If they think the cops are coming, if they don’t have time to organize, I think they’ll run, even if I’m dead.”
She shivered. “Jake . . .”
“We’ll be okay.” He grinned at her. “Maybe.”
When they were ready, Jake kissed her, said, “Keep shooting until you see them go down,” and stepped outside. The porch light was on, and he hurried away from it, into the dark. Probably three hours before they’d arrive, at the earliest, he thought. At this moment, they’d probably be somewhere in the Blue Ridge.
If they’d monitored the bug at all. But, he thought, they would have: too much was happening all at once, and the bug would be invaluable.
He walked away from the cabin in the narrow slash of light from his headlamp, the rifle slung over his shoulder, climbed the east hill on a trail he’d walked fifty times before, heading toward a crease in the hillside, hoping it wasn’t too wet.
When he got there, he tested it with his bare hands. No more damp than the rest of the hillside, and not bad. He unrolled his quiet pad in the low vegetation, trying not to crush any more of the leafy plants than necessary, unrolled his sleeping bag on top of it, then slipped inside.
Inside the bag, he could move with absolute silence; and he’d stay loose and warm. He’d jacked a shell into the rifle’s chamber in the cabin; he tested the safety, to make sure it was on, then snuggled up to the rifle, the muzzle just outside the top of his head.
And went to sleep.
He’d learned a long time before that sleep was protective; you were silent in your sleep, as long as you didn’t snore, and if you were in an ambush, you didn’t snore. You also woke up at any non-natural sound, and at fifteen- or twenty-minute intervals.
He did that for an hour, then two hours, then three, the minute hand on his watch seeming to jump around the dial as he went in and out of sleep. At four, he was done with the sleep. He’d heard several small animals in the dark—skunks, maybe, possums, raccoons—but nothing larger. There’d been no flashes from behind the cabin.
At five-thirty, he heard movement above him and to the south. Listening, hard. Turned his head that way, looking for a light. Moving in the dark was difficult in the Virginia woods; even a red LED lamp would help some, and shaded, pointed at the ground, normally wouldn’t be visible. But since he was below them, he might catch just a random flash . . .
He saw nothing. The movement stopped, and he listened, breathing silently, his nostrils twitching, an atavistic effort to find a scent. Down below, the cabin porch lights, and the yard light near the shed, lit up the yard. There were two lights on inside the house, but no sound. Jake had told Madison not to turn the TV on until six o’clock, after turning on lights first in the upstairs bedroom, then in the bathroom, and finally in the kitchen.
After twenty minutes of silence, he’d begun to wonder if he’d actually heard the movement, if it might not have been a departing deer. But he always thought that when he was hunting. You’d hear the sound, then you’d doubt it, and then you’d hear it again, and then you’d figure out where it was going, the angle, the speed, the shooting possibilities.
Sunrise wouldn’t be for another half an hour. If it had been Jake, he’d have gotten into a shooting spot before there was any movement in the cabin. If they were up there, they’d be watching the cabin and making last-minute plans. In a few minutes, they’d start down the hillside, probably a few yards apart. They’d go in as a team, he thought, rather than breaking up and circling against each other.
At a minute before six, he heard movement again, and at the same time got a single alert vibration from the walkie-talkie. Madison was up and moving. The light came on in the upper bedroom, and then in the bathroom. The movement stopped when the first light came on; it started again when the second light came up.
So they were here. A deer wouldn’t have frozen. And whoever it was, was doing it right, moving with almost imperceptible slowness, placing every foot carefully—but it was impossible to move through the woods without making some noise. If there’d been wind, Jake wouldn’t have been able to pick out the footfalls; but there was no wind. They were pretty decent at it, he thought. He’d have to keep that in mind.
By six-fifteen, daylight was coming on, enough to shoot, and he’d heard the movement pass him to the south, heading down the hill. A moment later, Madison turned on the kitchen light, and then the television. He gave her four beeps on the walkie-talkie, and she walked by the half-open blind of the kitchen window, fast enough that he caught just a flash of shirt.